I stumbled upon an essay I wrote some years ago yesterday. It’s a pretty good piece, kind of funny, part of my ongoing “Raised in a Barn” series of anecdotes about my odd childhood. I finished it, was pretty happy with it still… and then the thought occurred to me: it’s weird that I do this. This being: write essays retelling anecdotes about my parents, the Barn, bats and Christmas trees and the trapeze that hung in our hallway, et cetera.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
I mean, what’s the point? Writing fiction, you’re creating a world, and characters, and a narrative arc. Anecdotes may have characters and certainly take place in a world, and often they have a narrative arc, because otherwise it’s just… someone writing something that sounds like “My uncle had a frog named Bertram,” wth no therefore<\/em>. Memoir is a thriving subsection of American letters. Particularly popular are the “how I survived” memoirs, which range from true-life horror stories by survivors of crimes or horrific events, to “I had psychotic parents and I’m here to spill the tea” to “I left my abusive significant other, and you can too” to “I survived all that medical science could do to me, and I’m cured, but I’m still angry.” Survival memoirs can be instructional or inspirational, and some them are very angry.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Some memoirs are less about survival than they are about “what the hell happened?” Many memoirs by famous people, particularly famous women, fall under that banner. They promise the inside skinny, the truth that the news or TikTok or Instagram won’t tell you. Sometimes they’re inspirational too. And there are memoirs that are less about the author and more about evoking a time and place.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n I have read memoirs that failed because they had no there<\/em> there–the equivalent of talking about Uncle Fred and his frog Bertram. Books where the author (and presumably the publisher) thought there was something compelling about their story, what they lived through, saw, survived, but that missed that narrative arc. Maybe they thought it was implicit, but it wasn’t. If \u00a0I read a memoir and I don’t come out of it with a sense of what the author really wanted me to know (beyond, say Abusive Spouses Are Bad! or Running for President is Unpleasant!) I don’t think it works.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n It takes a certain mindset to write a memoir. You have to be convinced that other people will care about a story you’re telling about YOU. <\/em>That requires some audacity, doesn’t it? To believe that your story will have meaning to anyone else? Audacity is a well-known tool in the writer’s kit, right there was grammar and spelling. If I’m going to write a memoir (and I haven’t talked myself out of it just yet) I need to have–not just the audacity to believe that someone is going to find meaning in it, but a narrative arc that creates that meaning.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n <\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I stumbled upon an essay I wrote some years ago yesterday. It’s a pretty good piece, kind of funny, part of my ongoing “Raised in a Barn” series of anecdotes about my odd childhood. I finished it, was pretty happy with it still… and then the thought occurred to me: it’s weird that I do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4778"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4785,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4778\/revisions\/4785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
I think about this because I have been toying, off and on, with the idea of blowing my “Raised in a Barn” anecdotes up into a memoir. That’s hard because I run aground on “what’s the point,” or rather “why would this matter to anyone else?”<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
I spent the past weekend among family at the celebration of life for my late and entirely wonderful Aunt Julie. There was a graveside meet up (it was non-religious, so calling it a service is a misnomer) at which I spoke–and there were probably 30 or so people there, including caregivers, a co-worker, friends, and of course, family. And we all told stories about Aunt Julie and what made her so delightful, and there were tears and a whole lot of laughter. It was effortless to tell these stories, because everyone there loved my aunt. That was the point: to share the different aspects of my aunt’s life and her character and to celebrate her. The stories had meaning for everyone there.<\/p>\r\n